For Women, Pain Comes With Gains

August 21, 1989|By New York Times

Over the past 20 years, the women's movement has transformed the American workplace. In increasing numbers, women are on the job in corporate law offices and aboard space shuttles. They are giving orders on factory floors and on the drill fields of West Point.

But while women's progress is visible and public, as are the controversies over whether the pace of change has been proper, men and women are sorting out the implications in the privacy of their homes, questioning the price they have paid for change.

And Americans, both men and women, say they are unhappy about the toll on their family and personal lives.

In a New York Times poll, taken to measure how America views the changes in the role of women over the quarter-century since Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique was published, women who work outside the home report that their children and their marriages are being shortchanged and they lament having too little time for themselves.

In the poll of 1,497 adults, conducted from June 20 through 25, 83 percent of working mothers and 72 percent of working fathers said they were torn by the conflicting demands of their jobs and the desire to see more of their families.

Forty-eight percent of all women respondents said women had to sacrifice too much for their gains. Respondents of both sexes cited children and family life as the primary casualties.

''We're living in the middle of a stalled revolution,'' said Arlie Hochschild, sociologist at the University of California at Berkeley.

In her recent book The Second Shift, published by Viking Penguin, she argues that a majority of women shoulder the two burdens of work at home and a paid job outside, a situation that can undermine their family life, jobs and well-being.

But, Friedan said in an interview: ''These new problems are not as bad as it used to be. The situation of women in America is infinitely better than it was 25 years ago.''

Indeed, statistics tell an undeniable story of women's advancement in the workplace.

The sheer number of women who work outside the home has climbed each year for the last two decades.

Women have made dramatic inroads in many previously off-limits occupations.

The nation has put women on its space shuttles, in the No. 2 spot on the presidential ticket of a major party and on the Supreme Court.

And progress is just as visible over the last two decades in less-exalted endeavors.

Almost half of all accountants and bus drivers are women, up from 23.3 percent and 29.7 percent in 1970. One out of five of the nation's doctors and lawyers is a woman; 20 years ago, women accounted for 7 percent of the doctors and 3 percent of the lawyers.

Women have made less progress in getting paid the same as men and in breaking into certain careers and management jobs.

The ratio between what the average woman earns and what the average man earns has risen to 70 cents on the dollar, up from 62 cents in the late 1960s.

And women are almost absent from the better-paying, unionized ranks of pilots, mechanics and construction workers, to name just a few of the occupations in which women hold fewer than 4 percent of the jobs.

The statistics do not quite capture the presence of what Barbara Reskin, University of Illinois sociologist, calls female ''ghettos,'' undesirable shifts or low-wage assignments that are occupied almost exclusively by women within otherwise integrated workplaces.

In the real estate business, for instance, ''male flight'' from the residential end of sales to the far more lucrative commercial side has created a lower-paid enclave of women within that field.

Women hold more than 39 percent of the jobs that the Labor Department classifies as executive, administrative and managerial, up from 32 percent five years ago.

But women fill only 3 percent of the most coveted top management positions at the country's largest publicly traded corporations, a figure that is expected to rise to 16 percent by 2000, according to a study by Korn Ferry International, an executive recruiting firm.

One major hope from the early days of the women's movement has not been realized - the idea that women in positions of authority would somehow make the workplace a nicer place.

The poll found that 63 percent of women and 70 percent of men said that to succeed, women have to be as tough as men. But 35 percent of women and 26 percent of men said they expected women to make business gentler as they rise to positions of authority.